Archaeology & My Experience With The Call of Cthulhu RPG
The Call of Cthulhu RPG has more archaeology references than the video game counterpart. It is a fantastic experience to play as well, if the right people are running it, and it feels like an investigation. Depending on the group, the experience can vary, but there are a lot of things that can contribute to that feeling.
There are several different packages put together by Chaosium that are considered to be “beginner experiences” and the amount of archaeological detail will change based on what experience is being run. No matter what, a team of investigators are gathered to solve a mystery that usually has something to do with a cult, a strange disappearance, or an eldritch horror of some kind. The developers have also done their best to create the game in a way that both mirrors the experience of the 1920s while also separating the work from the author and taking what made Lovecraft spooky and leaving behind what made him racist.
It is a delicate balance to tread, but the RPG does it well and even starts with suggestions for how to make it a better and more diverse experience for everyone at the table. That all said, I was able to experience playing the game in a very archaeological fashion while attending PAX Unplugged in 2024.
The experience was run by an experienced Lore Master, and it was organized by the developers. When we got to the table, I said that I had some experience with the game but was relatively new to it, but that I had done a lot of research on Lovecraft specifically and was an archaeologist myself. That landed me with the role of the archaeologist, who I named Kara Loft, and our investigation started in Egypt near Gizeh but not quite there, looking at a solid wall that we had to get into in order to prove our hypothesis.
It was an oddly strange and satisfying experience.
To sum up the story itself, our investigations entered the chamber, found eerie hieroglyphs that appeared to be inverted, accidentally summoned an eldritch horror, set the tomb of the eldritch horror on fire, and barely escaped to tell the tale. The strange part for me was being able to let some of those intrusive thoughts as an archaeologist escape - like what if I just burned up the mummy? It was a little silly from that perspective, but it did allow me to play with archaeology in a way that I usually don’t.
Kara herself went a little insane in the Lovecraftian sense, as the sight of the eldritch horror was too much for her, and that was what incentivized the character to light the rest of the room on fire. It was a downhill journey from there on for that character, but an overall fun time for me. However, at the end, after most of the group had escaped the tomb, they ran outside to find the locals all staring at the entrance, who saw our group and said, “You shouldn’t be alive.”
That was the end.
Now there are a couple of specific things from this game that I want to call out as being directly related to other topics on this site:
1. The Archaeology
The excavation itself actually felt fairly accurate for the time. It’s being sponsored by a rich noble who has nothing better to spend money on and wants the glory of finding something like Tutankhamen. It was also done by not being overly cautious. Archaeologists were not very worried about preserving details for the future at the time, they were more interested in the artifacts themselves. It was about the trophy and far less about learning something. This felt almost too well represented in the game, as my character searched for something that would fund more excavations and land her an official title back home.
2. The Eldritch Horror
It was an odd reflection of reality, with things that would be recognizable from Egyptian mythology but inverted or mirrored in such a way that it didn’t feel quite right. This felt a lot like Under The Pyramids or either of the other two main tales, where there are things that reflect human mythologies among the horrors, but they are just wrong enough to make the humans question what they are seeing. The loss of sanity came from not being able to comprehend that revelation, and not because my character had a mental illness. It felt like the right amount of comparison to the Egyptian mythology without using a stereotype to justify or change it.
3. The Locals
As mentioned before, there is this strange kind of tension between the locals and the academics or outsiders in several of Lovecraft’s pieces. This can come through via full-on racial stereotypes or be as simple as the tension between the “simple” villagers who know better and the “greedy” antiquarians that push forward regardless. In our game, we didn’t interact with the locals very much, as we left them behind when we entered the chamber and the door shut behind us, but upon exiting the locals clearly knew that we shouldn’t be alive. This plays on that tension of the locals do know and are aware of the eldritch horrors, but they do not let on that they do nor warn the archaeologists, at least in this instance. However, it was also quite free of any racial stereotypes which would have been easy to add if they had chosen to do so. They did not, and I think it played a very nice balance between the locals and the greedy archaeologist who nearly sets the horrors free.
Overall, it was a great experience and from listening to others playing the game, reading about their experiences, and from what I have played myself, this seems to be the case for most people. While some may play it a little less seriously where it concerns the horror, others dive in. It’s a very customizable experience, but anyone’s character can take up an interest in archaeology or history or something similar. And it can even relieve a lot of stress from a tired archaeologist who is angry at the institution.
